The novelist and broadcaster Cristina Odone celebrates a friend's efforts to
help struggling children in south London learn to read

My old friend Jill Chisholm has inspired me to volunteer. Jill found herself, in her early sixties, going through a very difficult time in her life, with family tragedy and her mother’s diagnosis with Alzheimer’s.

In the midst of it all, she read about a project to get volunteers to go into schools in some of the toughest areas of south London and help them with their reading. It struck a chord in her. “In my own life,” she told me, “reading has always been a great solace and I want these children to have that same opportunity.”

And so she volunteered. The primary school she was assigned to regularly had police at the gates, but that didn’t put Jill off one bit, as she would tell me after her sessions there. Almost immediately I noticed the difference in her.

She was working with youngsters who would tell her that they had had no breakfast that morning, or about their own troubles at home. Because she wasn’t a teacher, they opened up to her as they would a friend.

It was an experience that reaped big benefits for Jill – and for the children she worked with. At the end of her first year there, the pupils wrote her thank-you letters. “Dear Miss Jill,” read one, “I used to sit in the naughty corner, but because of what you have taught me about reading I now go all the time into the quiet corner.”

Listening to her recount this, I knew at once that it doesn’t get much better than this. She is transforming lives and transforming her own life in the process. So when, very sadly, her mother died, she was able to turn back to those letters from the pupils to help her through a very bleak period. Watching her, I resolved, one day, to follow in her footsteps.

Cristina Odone, novelist and broadcaster, is a columnist for The Telegraph